preg_match second match

Question

Just trying to preg_match the second match.

<?php
$url = "http://domain.com";
preg_match('~<table([^>]*)(class\\s*=\\s*["\']ladder-table["\'])([^>]*)>(.*?)</table>~i', file_get_contents($url), $match);
print $match[0];    
?>

Here is the table I'm trying to find:

<table class="ladder-table">Content</table>
<table class="ladder-table">Content</table> <-- [This one]
<table class="ladder-table">Content</table>

The last two tables are hidden by a java script code. Does it influence on the pattern?

preg_match only checks for a single match. You want preg_match_all :-) — cmbuckley, Jan 29 '13 at 00:14
**Don't use regular expressions to parse HTML**. You cannot reliably parse HTML with regular expressions. As soon as the HTML changes from your expectations, your code will be broken. See http://htmlparsing.com/php.html for examples of how to properly parse HTML with PHP modules. — Andy Lester, Jan 29 '13 at 00:17

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

If you want to continue to use regular expressions, use preg_match_all:

$url = "http://domain.com";
preg_match_all('~<table([^>]*)(class\\s*=\\s*["\']ladder-table["\'])([^>]*)>(.*?)</table>~i', file_get_contents($url), $match);
print_r($match[0][1]);

This may be enough for your requirements. However, it's difficult to make your code robust enough to deal with changes to the HTML; for instance, the above wouldn't match if Content has any new lines, because you're checking for .*? without the PCRE_DOTALL modifier.

The correct way to handle this would be using a proper HTML parser such as DOM or others.

preg_match second match

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